Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century

Eripos6 <of 1939>

Introduction
History is likeJanus; it has two faces. \A4rether it looks at the past or at rhe present, it
sees the same

things.
vo1. 6, p. 315

-Maxime

Du Canp, Paris,

The subject of this book is an illusion expressed by Schopenhauer in the following formula: to seize the essence of history it su{fices to compare Herodorus and the morning newspaper.l What is expressed here is a feeling of vertigo characteristic of the nineteenth century's conception of history. It corresponds to a viewpoint according to which the course of the world is an endless series of facts congealed in the form of things. The characteristic residue of this concepbion is what has been called the "History of Civilization," which makes an inventory point by point, of humanity's life forms and creations. The riches thus amassed in the aerarium of civfization henceforth appear as though identified for all time. This conception of history minimizes the fact that such riches owe not only their existence but also their transmission to a constant effort of sociery-an effort, moreover, by which these riches are strangely altered. Our investigation proposes to show hoq as a consequence of this reifying representation of civilization, the nen' forms of behavior and the new economically and technologically based creatioru that we owe to the nineteenth cenrury enter the universe of a phantasmagoria. These crearions undergo this "illumination" not only in a theoretical manner by al ideological transposition, but also in the immediacy of their perceptible presence. They are manifest as phantasmagorias. Thus appear the arcades-first entry in the field of iron construction; thus appear the world exhibitions, whose link to the entertainment industry is significant. Also included

in this order of phenomena is the experience of the flAneur, who abandons to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace. Corresponding to these phantasmagorias of the market, where people appear only as types, are the
himself
phantasmagorias of the interior, which are constituted by man's imperious need to leave the imprint of his private individual existence on the rooms he inhabits. As for the phantasmagoria of civilization itself, it found its champion in Hauss-

mann and its manifest expression in his transformations of Paris.-Nevertheless, the pomp and the splendor with which commodity-producing sociefy surrounds itse( as-well as its illusory sense of securiry [Link] not immune to dangers; the collapse of the Second Empire and the Commune of Paris remind it of that. In the same period, the most dreaded adversary of this society, Blanqui, revealed to it, in his last piece of writing, the terrifying fearures of this phantasmagoria. Humaniry figures there as damned. Everything new it could hope for turns out

b
X

o
og,
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to be a realiry that has always been present; and this ner,t'ness will be as little capable of furnishing it with a liberating solution as a new fashion is capable of rejuvetrating society. Blanqui's cosmic speculation conveys this lesson: that hurnanity will be prey to a mythic anguish so long as phantasmagoria occupies a place in it.

A. Fouriero or the Arcades

I
The magic columns of
rhese Palais Show to enthusiasts fiom all Parts, With the objects their porticos display, That industry is the rival of the arts.

-Nouueaux

Tableaux de

Pari

(Paris, 1828), p. 27

Most of the Paris arcades are built in the fifteen years following 1822. The first condition for their development is the boom in the textile trade. Magasins de nouueautds, the first establishments to keep large stocks of merchandise on the premises, make their appearance. They are the forerunners of department stores. This is the period of which Balzac writes: "The great poem of display chants its stanzas of ctlor from the Church of the Madeleine to the Porte Saint-Denisl'The arcades are centels of commerce in luxury items. In fitting them out' alt entels the service of the merchant. Contemporaries never tire of admiring them. For a long time they remain an attraction for tourists. An Illustrated Guide to Paris says: "These arcades, a lecent invention of industrial luxury are glass-roofed, marblepaneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners havejoined together for such enterprises. Liningboth sides of the arcade, which gets ils Hght from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a ciry a world in miniature." The arcades are the scene of the first attempts at gas
lighting.
second condition for the emergence of the arcades is the beginning of iron construction. Under the Empire, this technology was seen as a contribution to the revival of architecture in the classical Greek sense. The architecrural theorist Boetticher expresses the general view of the matter when he says that' "with

-The

regard to the art forms of the new system, the Hellenic mode" must come to prevail. The Empire style is the sryle of revolutionary terrorism, for which the state is an end in itself. Just as Napoleon failed to understand the functional

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nanrre of the stare as an insrrument of domination by the bourgeoisie, so the ar-chirecrs of hi-. cime failed to understand the functional nafure of iron, with u-hich tlee consmrccive principle begins its domination of architecture. These ar-chirect design supports resembling Pompeian columns, and factories that imirare residenrial houses, just as later the first railroad stations will assume the look of cha-lers. Consfruction plays the role of the subconscious. Nevertheless, the concepr of engineer, which dates from the revolutionary wars, starts to gain ground. and the rivalry begins between builder and decorator, Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole des Beaux-Arts.-For the first time since the Romans, a new ardficial building material appears: iron. It will undergo an evolution whose pace will accelerate in the course of the cenrury. This development enters a decisive new phase when it becomes clear that the locomotive-object of the most diverse experiments since the years 1828-1829-usefully functions only on iron rails. The rail becomes the first prefabricated iron component, the precursor of the girder. Iron is avoided in home constmction but used in arcades, exhibition halls, train stations-buildings that serve transitory purposes.

II
It is easy to understand that every mass-tlpe "interest" which
asserts itself historically goes far beyond its real limits in the "idea" or "imagination," when it first comes on the scene.

-Marx

and Engels, Die heilige Familie2

The secret cue for the Fourierist utopia is the advent of machines. The phalanstery is designed to restore human beings to a system of relationships in which moraliry becomes superfluous. Nero, in such a context, would become a more useful member of sociery than trEnelon. Fourier does not dream of relying on virtue for this; rather, he relies on an efficient functioning of sociery whose motive forces are the passions. In the gearing of the passions, in the complex meshing of the passions micanistes with d'rc passion cabaliste, Fourier imagines the collective psychology as a clockwork mechanism. Fourierist harmony is the necessary product of this combinatory play.

Fourier introduces into the Empire's world of austere forms an idyll colored by the style of the 1830s. He devises a system in which the products of his colorful vision and of his idiosyncratic treatrnent of numbers blend together. Fourier's "harmonies" are in no way akin to a mysrique of numbers taken from any other tradition. They are in fact direct outcomes of his own pronouncements-lucubrarions of his organizational imagination, which was very higltly developed. Thus, he foresaw how significant meetings would become to the citizen. For the phalanstery's inhabitants, the day is organized not around the home but in large halls similar to those of the Stock Exchange, where meetings are arranged by brokers. In the arcades, Fourier recognized the architectural canon of the phalanstery. This is what distinguishes the "empire" character of his utopia, which Fourier himself naively acknowledges: "The societarian state will be all the more brillianr at its inception for having been so long deferred. Greece in the age of Solon and

Pericles could already have undertaken it."3 The arcades, which originally were

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designed to serye commercial ends, become dwelling places in Fourier" The phalanstery is a ciry composed of arcades. In this uille en passages, the engineer's constnrction takes on a phantasmagorical character. The "city of arcades" is a dream that will charm the fancy of Parisians well into the second half of the cenrury. As late as 1869, Fourier's "street-galleries" provide the blueprint for Moilin's Paris en I'an 2000.a Here the ciry assumes a strucrure that makes it-with its shops and apartments-the ideal backdrop for the flAneur. Marx took a stand against Carl Gnin in order to defend Fourier and to accenruate his "colossal conception of man."5 He considered Fourier the only man besides Hegel to have revealed the essential mediocriry of the petty bourgeois. The systematic overcoming of this r)?e in Hegel corresponds to its humorous annihilation in Fourier. One of the most remarkable fearures of the Fourierist utopia is that it never advocated the exploitation of nature by man, an idea that became widespread in the following period. Instead, in Fourier, technology appears as the spark that ignites the powder of narure. Perhaps this is rhe key to his sffange representation of the phalanstery as propagating itself "by explosion." The later conception of man's exploitation of nature reflects the acrual exploitation of man by the or,vners of the means of production. If the integrarion of the technological into social life failed, the fault lies in this exploitation.

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B. Grandvilleo or the World Exhibitions

I
when all the world from Paris to China your doctrine, O divine Saint-Simon, The glorious Golden Age will be reborn. Rivers will flow with chocolate and tea, Sheep roasted whole will frisk on the plain, And saut6ed pike will swim in the Seine. Fricasseed spinach will grow on the ground, Gamished with crushed ftied croutons;
Yes,

Pays heed to

The trees wili bring fonh apple compores, And far:rners will harvest boots and coats. It will snow wine, it will rain chickens, And ducks cooked with turnips will falt from the sky. -Langld
and Vanderburch. Louis-Bronze et Ie Saint-Simonien (ThdAtre du Palais-Royal,Febtuuy 27, 1832)

World exhibitions are places of pilgrimage to rhe commodiry fetish. "Europe is off to view the merchandise," says Thine in 1855.6 The world exhibitions were preceded by national efibitions of industry the first of which took place on the Champ de Mars in 1798. It arose from the wish "to entertain the working classes, and it becomes for them a festival of emancipation."T The workers would constirute their first clientele. The framework of the entertainment industry has not yet taken shape; the popular festival provides this. Chaptal's celebrared speech on

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Saint-Simonians, who envision the indu-"trializarion of the earth, take up the idea of world exhibitions. Chevalier, the frrst authorin- in *ris new field, is a srudent of Enfantin and editor of the SaintSirnonian nelrspaper Le Globe. The Saint-Simonians anticipated the development of rhe global economy, but not the class struggle. Thus, we see that despite their paniciparion in industrial and commercial entelprises around the middle of the cenrur)-. they were helpless on all questions concerning the proletariat. \\brld exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodiry. They create a framework in which its use value becomes secondary. They are a school in which the masses, forcibly excluded from consumption, are imbued with the exchange value of commodities to the point of identifying wirh it: "Do not touch the items on display'' World exhibitions thus provide access to a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. Within these diuertissements, to which the individual abandons himself in the framework of the entertainment industry he remains always an element of a compact mass. This mass delights in amusement parks-with their roller coasters, their "rwisters," their "caterpillars"-in an attitude that is pure reaction. It is thus led to that state of subjection which propa-

indu*"rr- opens the 1798

efibition.-The

ganda, industrial as well as political, relies on.-The enthronement of the commodity, with its glitter of distraclions, is the secret theme of Grandville's art. \[Link] the split berween its utopian and cynical elements in his work. The subtle artifices with which it represents inanimate objects correspond to what Marx calls the "theological niceties" of the commodity.8 The concrete expression of this is cleariy found in the spdcialit|-a category of goods which appears at this time in the luxuries industry. World exhibitions construct a universe of spicialitds. The fantasies of Grandville achieve the same thing. They modernize the universe. In his work, the ring of Sarurn becomes a cast-iron balcony on which the inhabitants of Saturn take the evening uit By the same token, at world exhibifions, a balcony of cast-iron would represent the ring of Saturn, and people who venture out on it would find themselves carried away in a phantasmagoria where they seem to have been transformed into inhabitants of Saturn. The literary counterpart to this graphic utopia is the work of the Fourierist savant Toussenel. Toussenel was the natural-sciences editor for a popular newspaper. His zoology classifies the animal world according to the rule of fashion. He considers woman the intermediary between man and the arrimals. She is in a sense the decorator of the animal world, which, in exchange, places at her feet its plumage and its furs. "The lion likes nothing better than having its nails trimmed, provided it is a preffy grl that wields the scissors."s

II
Fashion: "Madam Death! Madam Death!"

-Leopardi,

"Dialogue between Fashion and Death"10

Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands

to be worshipped. Grandville extends the authority of fashion to objects of everyday Llse) as well as to the cosmos. In taking it to an extreme, he reveals its

nature. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism which thus succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve. The fantasies of Grandville coffespond to the

H X

spirit of lashion that Apollinaire later described with this image: "Any material from nature's domain can now be introduced into the composition of women's clothes. I saw a charming dress made of corks. . . . Steel, wool, sandstone, and [Link] have suddenly entered the vestmentary [Link]. . . . They're doing shoes in Venetian glass and hats in Baccarat crystal."11

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C. Louis Philippe, or the Interior

I
I believe . . . it

-y

soul: the Thing.

-L6on

Deubel, Oeuures (Paris, 1929), p. 193

IJnder the reign of Louis Philippe, the private individual makes his entry into history. For the private individual, places of dwelling are for the first time opposed to places of work. The former come to consdftlte the interior' Its complement is the office. (For its part, the office is distinguished clearly from the shop counter, which, with its globes, wall maps, and railings, looks like a relic of the baroque forms that preceded the rooms in today's residences.) The private individual, who in the office has to deal with realities, needs the domeslic interior to sustain him in his illusions. This necessiry is all the more pressing since he has no intention of grafting onto his business interests a clear perception of his social function. Le the amangement of his private surroundings' he suppresses both of
these concerns. From this derive the phantasmagorias of the

interior-which, for

the private individual, Ieplesents the universe. In the interior, he brings togethel ,.-tt. locales and memories of the past. His living room is a box in the theater of the world The interior is the asylum where art takes refuge. The collector proves to be the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the idealization of objects. To him falls the Sislphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he can bestow on them only connoisseur

value, rather than use value. The collector delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone but also better-a world in which, to be sule, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the real world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.

II
Thehead...
On the night table, like
Rests.
a

ranunculus,

-Baudelaire,

"lJne Marry're"12

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X

The interior is [Link] the universe of the private individual; it is also his 6cui. Ever since the time of Louis Philippe, the bourgeois has shown a tendency to compensate for the absence of any trace of private life in the big ciry. He tries to do this within the four wa1ls of his apartment. It is as if he had made it a point of honor not to allow the traces of his everyday objects and accessories to get lost. Indefatigably, he takes the impression of a host of objects; for his slippers and his watches, his blankets and his umbrellas, he devises coverlets and cases. He has a marked preference for velour and plush, which pleserve the imprint of all contact. In the sryle characteristic of the Second Empire, the apartment becomes a sort of cockpit. The traces of its inhabitant are molded into the interior' Here is the origin of the detective story which inquires into these traces and follows these tracks. Poe-with his "Philosophy of Furnifure" and with his "new detectives"becomes the first physiognomist of the domestic interior. The criminals in early detective fiction are neither gentlemen nor apaches, but simple private citizens of the middle class ("The Black Catj' "The TellTale Heart," "William Wilson")'

ilI
This seeking for mlinolrire. . . was my [Link]. ' . . Where have not found it. ryhome? I ask and seek and have sought for it; I
-Niegsche,
Als o sprach

is-

/arathus

tra13

The liquidation of the interior took place during the last years of the nineteenth century in the work ofJugendstil, but it had been coming for a long time. The art of the interior was an art of [Link] sounds the death knell of the genre' It rises up against the infaruation of genre in the name of a mal du siicle, of a perpetually open-armed [Link] for the first time takes into [Link] certain tectonic forms. It also strives to disengage them from their funcfional relations and to present them as nalural constants; it strives, in short, to stylize them. The new elements of iron construction-especially the girdercommand the attention of this "modern sfyleJ' In the domain of ornamentation, it endeavors to integrate these forms into art. Concrete puts at its disposal new potentialities for architecture. With van de Velde, the house becomes the plastic
expression of the personaliry. Ornament is to this house what the signature is to a painting. It exults in speaking a linear, mediumistic language in which the flower, symbol of vegetal life, insinuates itself into the very lines of construction. ffhe curved line ofJugendstil appears at the same time as the title Les Fleurs du mal'

sort of garland marks the passage from the "Flowers of Evil" to the "souls of flowers" in Odilon Redon and on to Swann's faire catleya.)ta-Henceforth, as
Fourier had foreseen, the true framework for the life of the private citizen must be sought increasingly in offices and commercial centers. The fictional framework for ihe individual's life is constiruted in the private home. It is thus *:rat The Master [Link] takes the measure ofJugendstil. The attempt by the individual to vie with technology by relying on his inner flights leads to his dor,rrnfall: the architect Solness kills himself by plungrng from his tower.'5

D. Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris

NJ

I
Everything for me becomes allegory. -Baudelaire,
"Le Cygne"te

b )(' o(o
Cr)

Baudelaire's genius, which feeds on melancholy, is an allegorical genius. With Baudelaire, Paris becomes for the first time the subject of llric poetry. This poetry of place is the opposite of all poetry of the soil. The gaze which the allegorical genius turns on the city betrays, instead, a profound alienarion. It is the gaze of the flAneur, whose way of life conceals behind a beneficent mirage the anxiety of the future inhabitants of our metropolises. The flAneur seeks refuge in the crowd. The crowd is the veil firough which the famfiar city is rransformed for the flAneur into phantasmagoria. This phantasmagoria, in which the ciry appears now as a landscape, now as a roomi seems later to have inspired the d6cor of department stores, which thus put flAnerie to work for profit. In any case, department stores are the last precincts of flAnerie. In the person of the flAneur, the intelligentsia becomes acquainted with the marketplace. It surrenders itself to the market, thinking merely to look around; but in fact it is already seeking a buyer. In this intermediate stage, in which it still has patrons but is starting to bend to the demands of the market (in the guise of the feuilleton), it constitutes the bohime. The uncertainty of its economic position corresponds to the ambiguiry of its political funcrion. The latter is manifest especially clearly in the figures of the professional conspirators, who are recruited from the bohime. Blanqui is the most remarkable representalive of this class. No one else in the nineteenth cenfury had a revolutionary authority eomparable to his. The image of Blanqui passes like a flash of lightning through Baudelaire's "Litanies de Satan." Nevertheless, Baudelaire's rebellion is always that of the asocial man: it is at an impasse. The only sexual communion of his life was with
a prostitute.

II
They were the same, had risen from the same hell,
These centenarian rwins. -Baudelaire,
"Les Sept \4eillards"17

The flAneur plays the role of scout in the marketplace. As such, he is also the explorer of the crowd. Within the man who abandons himself to it, the crowd inspires a sort of dmnkenness, one accompanied by very specific illusions: the man flatters himself that, on seeing a passerby swept along by the crowd, he has accurately classified him, seen straight through to the innermost recesses of his soul-all on the basis of his external appearance. Physiologies of the time abound in evidence of this singular conception. Balzac's work provides excellent examples. The rJpical characters seen in passersby make such an impression on

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the senses that one cannot be surprised at the resultant curiosiry to go beyond them and caprure the special singularity of each person. But the nightmare that corresponds to the illusory perspicacity of the aforementioned physiognomist consists in seeing those distinctive traits-traits peculiar to the person-revealed to be nothing more than the elements of a new r)?e; so that in the final analysis a person of the greatest indMduality would rurn out to be the exemplar of a t)?e. This points to an agonizing phantasmagoria at the heart of flAnerie. Baudelaire develops it with great vigor in "Les Sept \fieillards," a poem that deals with the seven-fold apparition of a repulsive{ooking old man. This indMdual, presented as always the same in his rmrltipliciry testifies to the anguish of the ciry dweller who is unable to break the magic circle of the type even though he cultivates the most eccentric peculiarities. Baudelaire describes this procession as "infernal" in appearance. But the newness for which he was on the lookout all his life consists in nothing other than this phantasmagoria of what is "always the same." ffhe evidence one could cite to show that this poem transcribes the reveries of a hashish eater in no way weakens this interpretation.)

III
Deep in the [Link] to frnd the new

*Li
-Baudelaire,

Voyage"

18

The key to the allegorical form in Baudelaire is bound up with the specific signification which the commodity acquires by virtue of its price. The singular
debasement of things through their signification, something characteristic of seventeenth-century allegory corresponds to the singular debasement of things through their price as commodities. This degradation, to which things are subject because they can be taxed as commodities, is counterbalanced in Baudelaire by the inestimable value of novelty. La nouueautd represents that absolute which is no longer accessible to any intelpretation or comparison. It becomes the ultimate entrenchment of art. The final poem of Zes Fleurs du mal: "Le VoyageJ' "Death, old admiral, up anchor now."1s The final voyage of the flAneur: death. Its destination: the new. Newness is a qualiry independent of the use value of the commodity. It is the source of that illusion of which fashion is the tireless purveyor. The fact that art's last line of resistance should coincide with the commodity's most advanced line of attack-this had to remain hidden from Baudelaire. "Spleen et ideal"-in the title of this first cycle of poems in Les Fleurs du ma[ the oldest loanword in the French language was joined to the most recent one.20 For Baudelaire, there is no contradiction befween the two concepts. He recognizes in spleen the latest transfiguration of the ideal; the ideal seems to him the first expression of spleen. With this tide, in which the supremely new is presented

marked with the fatality of being one day antiquiry and it reveals this to whoever

to the reader as something "supremely oldj' Baudelaire has given the liveliest form to his concept of the modern. The [Link] of his entire theory of art is "modern beauty," and for him the proof of modernity seems to Qe this: it is

'.\imesses its birth. Here we meet the quintessence of the unforeseen, which for Baudelaire is an inalienable quality of the beautiful. The face of modernity itself rlasts us with its immemorial gaze. Such was the gaze of Medusa for the Creeks.

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E. Haussmarule or the Barricades

F (l)
CD

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I
I venerate the Beautiful, the Good, and all things geat; auriful nature, on which great art restsl{crv it enchants the ear and charms the eyel I -cr-e spring in blossom: women and roses.
tse

-Baron

Haussmann,

Confession

d'un lion deuenu uieux2r

ilaussmann's activity is incorporated into Napoleonic imperialism, which favors j:\'esrment capital. In Paris, speculation is at its height. Haussmann's expropria-

:ons give rise to speculation that borders on fraud. The rulings of the Court of Ca-ssation, which are inspired by the bourgeois and Orleanist opposition, in-:e ase the [Link] risks of Haussmannization. Haussmann tries to shore up his ::ctatorship by placing Paris under an emergency regime. In 1864, in a speech :.fore the National Assembly, he vents his hatred of the rootless urban popula:rn. This population grows ever larger as a result of his projects. Rising rents :ive the proletariat into the suburbs. The quartiers of Paris in this way lose their physiognomy. The "red belt" forms. Haussmann gave himself the title -srinctive "demolition artist." He believed he had a vocation for his work, and empha-: .'tes this in his memoirs. The central markerplace passes for Haussmann's most -':lcessful construction-and this is an interesting symptom. It has been said of -:-e Ile de la Cit6, the cradle of the ciry that in the wake of Haussmann only one -:urch, one public building, and one barracks remained. Hugo and Mdrim6e : jigest how much the transforrnations made by Haussmann appear to Parisians :i a monument of Napoleonic despotism. The inhabitants of the city no longer :.el at home there; they start to become conscious of the inhuman character of -':e metropolis. Maxime Du Camp's monumental work Paris owes its existence :, &is darrryring awareness. The etchings of Meryon (around 1850) constitute the ::adr mask of old Paris. The true goal of Haussmann's projects was to secure the city against civil war. He u-anted to make the erection of barricades in the streets of Faris impossible : : all time. With the same end in mind, Louis Philippe had already introduced .,'roden paving. Nevertheless, barricades had played a consideratrle role in the [Link]' Revolution. Engels studied the tactics of barricade fighting. Haussmann ..-ks to forestall such combat in two ways. Widening the streets will make the will cor-rnect the barracks in =:e cdon of barricades impossible, and new streets .:arqht lines with lhe workers' districts. Contemporaries christened the opera:, ir "srrategic embellishment."

<. A)

II
The flowery realm of decorations, The charm of landscape, of architecture, And all the effect of scenery rest

\O

Sole$ on the law ofpersPective.

p.
X

-Franz

Bolrle, Theater-Catechismus (Munrch), p. 7 4

Haussmann's ideal

in city planrring consisted of long straight sffeets opening onto broad perspectives. This ideal corTesponds to the tendency-common in the nineteenth cenrury-to ennoble technological necessities through spurious
artistic ends. The temples of the bourgeoisie's spirirual and secular power were to

find their apotheosis within the framework of these long streets. The perspectives, prior to their inauguration, were screened with carrvas draperies and unveiled like monuments; the view would then disclose a church, a train station' a"n equestrian statue, or some other symbol of civilization. With the Haussmanrnzation of Paris, the phantasmagoria was rendered in stone. Though intended to endure in quasi-perperuiry it also reveals its brittleness. The Avenue de l'Opdra according to a malicious saying of the day, affords a perspective on the -which,lodge at the Louvre-shows how unrestrained the prefect's megaloporter's
mania was.

Iil
Reveal to these depraved,

O Republic, by foiling their Plots, Your great Medusa face Ringed by red lightning.

-Pierre

Dupont. Chant

des ouuriert

The barricade is resurrected during the Commune. It is stronger and better designed than ever. It stretches across the great boulevards, often reaching a height of two srories, and shields the trenches behind it. Just as rhe Communist
Manfesto ends the age of professional conspirators, so the Commune puts an end to the phantasmagoria that dominates the earliest aspirations of the proletariat. It dispels the illusion that the task of the proletarian revolution is to complete the work of 'Bg in close collaboration with the bourgeoisie. This illusion had marked

fiom the Lyons riots to the Commune. The bourgeoisie in this error. Its battle against the social rights of the proletariat never shared
the period 1831-1871,
dates back to the gleat Revolution, and converges with the philanthropic movement that gives it cover and that was in its heyday under Napoleon III. Under his reign, this movement's monumental work appeared: Le Play's Ouuriers europiens

[European Workers]. Side by side with rhe overt position of philanthropy, the bourgeoisie has always maintained the covert position of class struggle.22 As early as 1831, in the Journal des ddbats, it acknowledged that "every manufaclurer lives in his factory like a

workers to succumb to its worst elements. Rimbaud and courbet took sides with the commune. The burning of paris is the worthy concrusion to Baron Haussmann's work of destrrrction.

plantation owner among his slaves." If it was fatal for the workers, rebellions of old thatlo theory of revolution had directed rheir course, it was this absence of theory that, from another perspective, made possibre their spontaneous energ.F and the enthusiasm wit]r which they set about establirhirrg u ,r.* ,[Link]. TIi, enthusiasm, which reaches its peak in the commun., u, ,I''., won over to the workers' cause the best elements of the bourgeoisie, but in the end led the

t\:
LT

Conclusion
Men of the nineteenth century the hour of our apparitions is fixed forever, and always brings us back the very same ones.
-Auguste
Blanqui, L'Eternit| par
les astres

(paris, 1g72), pp.74_75

history itself. Here is the essential passage:

book completes the century's constelation of phantasmagorias with one last, :or-i: phantasmagoria which implicitly comprehends the irr..ert critique of all the others- The ingenuous reflection, oiun autodidact, which form the [Link] portion of this work, open the way to merciless specurations that give the lie to the author's revolutionary lan. The conception of the univerr. ,,ihi.h Blanqui develops in this book, taking his basic pr.-ir., from the mechanistic narural sciences, proves to be a vision of he[. Ii is, moreover, the complement of that societywhich Blanqui, near the end of his life, was forced to adrnit had defeated him. The irony of this scheme-an irony which doubtress escaped the author himself-is that the terrible indictment he pronounces against society takes the form of an unqualified submission to its ,[Link]. Blanqui'Jbook presenrs the idea of eternal .:Il" ten years before ,(arathustra-r.n a manner scatcery less moving than that of Nietzsche, and with an extreme hallucinatory power. This power is anything but triumphant; it leaves, or, ,h. contraryla feeling of oppression. Blanqui here strives to trace an image of progress that (immemorial ltiquiry parading as up-ro-date novelry) rurns our tobe the phantasmagoria of
The entire universe is composed of astrar systems. 'ro create them, nature has only a hundred simple bodies its disposar. Despite the great uarr*tug. it derives fiom .at these resources, and the innumerable combinatio.r, thut ther. .[Link] afford its fecundity, the result is necessarily afnite number, Iike that of the elements them_ selves; and in order to fill its expanse, nature must repeat to infinity each of its original combinarions or t\pe-s. So each heavenly body, whatever it mighi be, exists in infinite number in time space, not only in one of its aspects buias it is at each ^and second of its existence, from birth to death. . . . The earth is one of these heavenly Every human being is thus etemal at every second of his or her edstence. 9."_d*, \44rat I write at rhis moment in a cell of the Fort du Taureau I have nritten and shall

During the commune, Blanqui was herd prisoner in the fortress of raureau. It was there that he wrore his L'Eternitd par les astres lEterniry via the Stars]. This

write throughout all etemiry-at

co

io

with a pen, clothed as I am^now, in circumstances [kJthese. And thus it is for everyone. . . . The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space. One cannot in good conscience demand anlthing more' These doubles exist in flesh and bone-indeed, in trousers and jacket, in crinoline and chignon. They are by no means phantoms; they are the present_eternalized'
a table,

o 9. X trl

Here, n"onetheless, lies a great drawback: there is no progress' ' ' ' \Arhat we call ,,progress,, is con-fined to iach particular world, and vanishes with it. Always and .*rj*[Link] in the terrestrial arena, the same drama, the same setting, on the same narrow stage-a noisy humanity infatuated with its ovm grandeur, believing itself to be the uni'ierse and iMng in its prison as though in some immense realm, only to founder at an early date along wilh its globe, which has bome with deepest disdain the burden of human arrogance. The same monotony, the same immobiliry on other heavenly bodies. The universe lepeats itself endlessly and paws the^ground in place. In infiniry eternity perforns-imperturbably-the same routines.2s

This resignation without hope is the last wold of the great revolutionary. The century was incapable of responding to the new technological possibfities with a new social order. That is why the last word was left to the errant negotiators between old and new who are at the heart of these phantasmagorias' The world dominated by its phantasmagorias-this, to make use of Baudelaire's term, is "modernity." Blanqui's vision has the entire universe entering the modernify of which Baudelaire's seven old men are the heralds. In the end, Blanqui views

novehy as an attribute of all that is under sentence of damnation. Likewise h Ciel et enfer lHeaven and Hell], a vaudeville piece that slighdy predates the book: in *ris piece the torments of hell figure as the latest novelty of all time, as "pains eternal and always new." The people of the nineteenth century whom Blanqui addresses as if they were apparirions' are natives of this region'